Sure, you can buy a netbook and run Linux on it, but what if that’s still too clunky and big for you? What if you want a mobile internet device, one that is open source, preferably? Even though the OpenPandora project appeared to be shrouded in a cloud of vapour, the product design team has now published a video of the open source MID in action.
It might not be the most beautiful gadget you’ve ever seen, but we geeks know that beauty comes within, right? Let’s skip to the video, but remember that this is a model, not a working product.
Don’t let the lack of organs fool you, the team has had them working for a while now, so the casing is actually the final piece of the puzzle. Its specifications are pretty decent, sporting an ARM Cortex-A8 600Mhz+ processor, PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware, 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD, 430-MHz TMS320C64x+ DSP Core, and the usual slots, ports, and wireless options. It runs Linux, in case you were still wondering, and the team claims a battery life of over ten hours.
Even though it was supposed to ship before Christmas 2008, it never made that date. Currently, the team estimates the release date to be somewhere around April 7th, 2009. Price will be around £199 (inc. VAT), $330, EUR 212 (exc.VAT).
DO FREAKING WANT. NOW.
Always wanted a GP2x. Now might want a Pandora, if it turns out reliable and durable. Don’t have much money to waste around :/
If you can’t afford a Pandora, there’s always the GP2x (I gotta take a) Wiz:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz
If they make one of these on top of a Tegra, I’d be all over that. A tiny device capable of powering my Plasma TV would be SO AWESOME!!
On a side note, I really hope ARM is able to take a significant enough portion of the CPU market from Intel in this segment – competition is great!
Sorry…the tegra core is arm11 single issue only. The core itself is utterly thrashed by the cortex which is super scalar with a general purpose SIMD unit.
Only thing tegra has going for it is possibly the nvidia part which only accelerates very specific types of video codecs and nothing else.
The freescale cortex a8 variant looks interesting…they licensed their video core from ATI. I would think there’s a real possibility this would thrash the tegra all around, but that’s only speculation.
Hmmm, I’m clearly going to have to look into the intricacies of the ARM architecture. 🙂
Thanks.
There’s a somewhat more impressive video of an OpenPandora with internal components being demoed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MaIQYHd23A
Evidently this is not the final version, as the presenter notes at one point, as the keyboard seems to have no markings on the keys in either this video or the one linked to earlier.
The prototype here has no internal battery and seems to be dependent on a desktop to download software to it; maybe the SD card slots aren’t working yet.
I think mazza558 of the unofficial blog posted that release date, not the Pandora team. At least, that’s what it says in this article: http://openpandora.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/pandora-gets-major-tech…
It’s probably noteworthy that the first production batch of these has been sold out for 6 months or so. Which means that if you want one of these now, you would have to wait for probably another 6-8 months.
Hopefully, the BeagleBoard (similar hardware to the OpenPandora) gets support for raw LCD output in the rev C boards, so the geekiest of us could put something similar together ourselves
you could always check out gumstix new platform.
you can get raw lcd output there.
http://www.gumstix.net/Hardware/view/Hardware-Specifications/Overo-…
Thanks!!
The Gumstix Overo looks like tons of fun, at least with the expansion boards! Wasn’t even aware of that one.